Bringing poetry from one language to another

In a provocative conversation in last month’s issue of Poetry magazine, Adam Kirsch and Ilya Kaminsky discuss the nature of translation. Kirsch quotes the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky to the effect that authentic translation of poetry must replicate the exact meter and rhyme of the original, since “verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted.” If that is true, Kaminsky replies, “We can stop now and announce to the world that translation is impossible.”

In skillful hands, Kaminsky insists, rhythm and music can be reinvented, and that such reinvention will have to suffice since nothing more than that is possible. Moreover, there are times when the translation is as good as the original — and sometimes better. Yeats’ masterful love poem “When You are Old” is, Kaminsky reminds us, a version of a poem by Ronsard.

The occasion of that conversation between Kirsch and Kaminsky was the publication last month of a brilliant new anthology of 20th-century poetry, “The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry,” edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris (Ecco Books, 540 pages, $19.99). In his smart and entertaining introductory essay, Kaminsky points out that even if in translation “the music of the original is almost always lost ... the magic of image, litany, rhythm and incantation does survive linguistic boundaries.” And a good many of the translations in this anthology prove his point; most read gracefully in English. Here’s an incisive four-line poem by the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai in a translation by Chana Bloch: I know a man / who photographed the view he saw / from the window of the room where he made love / and not the face of the woman he loved there.

If you want to have a significant taste of the work of the major world poets of the 20th century — poems by Akhmatova, Amichai, Blok, Brecht, Cavafy, Darwish, Hikmet, Lorca, Machado, Mayakovsky, Milosz, Neruda, Paz, Pasternak, Rilke, Ritsos, Senghor, Tsvetaeva, Ungaretti and more than 200 other towering figures of 20th-century poetry — then this is the anthology you’ve been waiting for.

Here’s a provocative poem by the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Petri that seems perfectly at home in its English version: I am stuck Lord, on your hook. / I’ve been wriggling there, curled up, / for the past twenty-six years / alluringly, and yet / the line has never gone taut. / It’s now clear / there are no fish in your river. / Lord, if you still have hopes, / choose some other worm. Being / among the elect / has been beautiful. / All the same, / what I’d just like to do, right now, / is dry off and loll about in the sun. Is this a religious plea or a poem of bitter apostasy?

And who can resist this dark, laconic, stunningly emblematic piece of verse by the Syrian poet Adonis, titled “A Mirror for the Twentieth Century”: A coffin bearing the face of a boy / A book / Written on the belly of a crow / A wild beast hidden in a flower / A rock / Breathing with the lungs of a lunatic: / This is it / This is the Twentieth Century.

The idiosyncratic translation of Rilke’s Eighth Duino Elegy in the anthology brought to mind the splendid versions of Rilke’s poetry done into English several years ago by Stephen Mitchell. His “Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus” can be found in a new edition that Vintage Books brought out just last year (284 pages, $15). And Mitchell’s highly satisfying re-creations of Rilke’s marvelous earlier poems are also not to be missed (“The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”).

Ten years ago, Wesleyan University Press republished “A Test of Poetry,” a slender, intriguing book by the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky (178 pages, $16), that shows the reader poems in a variety of translations so that one can see how two or three translators have handled the same material. Zukofsky is reticent to express his own judgments, offering instead brief commentaries and allowing readers to decide for themselves what versions are and are not successful: which versions come to life and which are flaccid or puffed up or, for one reason or another, hopelessly unsatisfying. For poets, translators, serious readers and anyone else curious about translation, it’s a revelatory guide to an all-but-impossible art.

Steve Kowit will read from his new book, “Crossing Borders,” and Lenny Silverberg, the artist with whom he collaborated, will exhibit and discuss the original drawings at the Ink Spot in the East Village, next Sunday at 1:30 p.m.